Twitter has released open-source software that iOS and OS X programmers can use to build in Google's SPDY technology for faster Web connections.

The software, called CocoaSPDY, is a library of prewritten software that programmers can incorporate into their own apps, said Twitter programmer Mike Schore in a blog post Thursday.

SPDY is designed to speed up Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the standard that governs how Web browsers fetch pages from Web servers. Some SPDY ideas are being incorporated into HTTP 2.0, but meanwhile, Google and other allies continue to advance SPDY.

Twitter said its tests have shown that SPDY does indeed speed up Web connections for software using its services using Twitter's API (application programming interfaces). The improvements are particularly strong on mobile networks where communication delays called latencies are worse.

"We're still actively experimenting with and tuning our SPDY implementation in order to improve the user's experience in our app as much as possible. However, we have measured as much as a 30 percent decrease in latency in the wild for API requests carried over SPDY relative to those carried over HTTP," Schore said. "In particular, we've observed SPDY helping more as a user's network conditions get worse."

About the author

Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and covers browsers, Web development, digital photography and new technology. In the past he has been CNET's beat reporter for Google, Yahoo, Linux, open-source software, servers and supercomputers. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces.
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